Pakistan

September 23, 2009

For a nation in serious debt Pakistan has perfected the art of dunning the world for more money. President Asif Ali Zardari is not happy that when he swiped his debit card to take some money out at the Coalition Support Fund it was declined.

According to Dawn News now he is asking Washington to reimburse $1.6 billion that Islamabad is supposed to have spent on combating terrorism. He has to be the only debtor in the world who is actually chasing his creditors.

Zardari also wants an expeditious release of $6 billion that a donor conference in Tokyo pledged earlier this year. If you think it is already becoming hard to keep track of all the money Pakistan gets/wants/needs here is some more. They are awaiting the U.S. Congress to adopt a bill promising $1.5 billion a year for five years. This is on top of the $2.376 billion that the Congress approved on Monday for 2008-2009. There is already a request pending for an additional $2.282 billion for 2009-10.

I am sure all of these payments are perfectly justified. However, it is not entirely clear who keeps track of how these billions are spent. The other day former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf declared that some of the US military aid had been diverted to his country's defense against India. There has to be someone who audits Pakistan's accounts annually. I would love to talk that someone.

September 07, 2009

I am glad that former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has clarified that he was not a dictator. One would never have known the difference otherwise. After all dictators do not stage military coups, threaten to jail political opponents, dismantle the judiciary and refuse to step down as the army chief for a long time.

"If I was a dictator, the media would not have gotten independence during (my) tenure," he reportedly told a delegation of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) in London according to, Online news agency. That's a fair point but then even dictators can chose to be selectively fair.

In August last year Musharraf resigned as president as part of a deal reportedly brokered by Saudi Arabia, Britain and the US. Under the deal Musharraf was said to have been granted immunity from his actions in office, including the declaration of an emergency and the firing of the Supreme Court judges in November, 2007.

There are reports that Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz invited former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whom Musharraf had ousted in a bloodless coup and who is not the leading opposition figure in Pakistan, and Pakistani Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry to discuss Pakistan's political situation and the issue of Musharraf's trial. The Saudi king wants Pakistan to keep its side f the bargain not to prosecute Musharraf.

Is it just me or there are others who are amused by the complete absurdity of a Saudi king calling a former prime minister and a sitting chief justice of a "sovereign" country and discussing among other things not pursuing prosecution of a former coup leader? This plot is priceless. Too bad I cannot copyright it.

On a separate note, Musharraf spends most of his time these days in London. When he ruled his opponents Benazir Bhutto and Sharif were practically in exile in London. Now that Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zardari is in power Musharraf spends as much time he as he possibly can in London. This plot is priceless.

May 31, 2009

No country in the world inspires alarmism the way Pakistan
does. By its very definition alarmist perspectives have an element of
exaggeration or overstatement. However, when someone of the caliber of Ahmed
Rashid writes the following passage one has to pay attention. All of us,
including yours truly, have for a long time wondered and speculated over the
what-if scenarios of the worst kind that Pakistan will soon have to confront or
is already confronting. Rashid has a piece in the New York Review of Books’
June 11 issue that offers what is the likeliest conclusion of all the frenzied
prognostications.

Here is what Rashid writes, “Pakistan is close to the brink,
perhaps not to a meltdown of the government, but to a permanent state of
anarchy, as the Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many
allies take more territory, and state power shrinks. There will be no mass
revolutionary uprising like in Iran in 1979 or storming of the citadels of
power as in Vietnam and Cambodia; rather we can expect a slow, insidious,
long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis that the Taliban have lit and
that the state is unable, and partly unwilling, to douse.”

The fuse that Rashid talks about has to be a particularly
long and slow-burning one because when you look at the history of Pakistan you
get the feeling that it has been on ever since its creation in 1947. For
whatever reasons the country has always given the vibes of an entity eternally churning
with profound restiveness. My visits to the country in the 1990s, although
overwhelmingly hospitable, could not disguise the innate feeling of uncertainty
that leapt out ever so frequently in many conversations. It was like meeting a
highly excitable person at a street corner whose next move you could not
anticipate.

May 25, 2009

This morning I posted a short entry about how my blog on May
7 and Ahsan Butt’s blog http://fiverupees.blogspot.com/
on May 17 used a common expression of “take your son to work day” in describing
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari bringing his son Bilawal to the White House
summit recently. The entry was posted before I communicated with Ahsan, who presumed
that I implied plagiarism on his part despite having communicated via email.

There has been some back and forth between Ahsan and I via
email, extracts of which he has reproduced on his blog while denouncing my 'dishonesty.' It is not my natural disposition to be melodramatic and hence I am
going to let his angry response slide by.

As far as I am concerned I accept his explanation that our
using the same expression was merely a coincidence and that’s that. I removed
my entry the moment I noticed Ahsan’s email this afternoon. It makes no
difference to me whether he wants to retain his rebuttal on his blog.

I respect Ahsan’s sensitivity about intellectual property
and conclude this futile discussion. For the record the entry was posted before
I communicated with Ahsan.

May 11, 2009

Going by what an editorial in The News of Pakistan says, the
world trading community might have to evolve a label called “Taliban Free” on
certain kinds of marble, emerald and timber. The paper says illicit trade in
gemstones, timber and marble is helping fund the Taliban.

"It is not possible to put a definitive figure on how
much the Taliban are making from their excursion into economic activity, but
the government estimates that it is losing Rs.65 billion ($800 million)
annually from the illegal timber trade and indiscriminate deforestation
alone," the newspaper says.

It seems there is at least a reasonable chance that the
marble on your kitchen countertop or on your floor may have come to you
courtesy those who flog and behead in the name of religion. The funding sources
of the Taliban and other such extremist groups have always been a matter of
great international curiosity. While narcotics have also been said to be a
source of revenues, gems and marble could well be playing a significant part.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)
in Pakistan’s northwest, where the Taliban enjoy considerable influence, is
known for its marble deposits. The News reports that the Taliban took over Ziarat
quarry in the Mohmand Agency in April last year. With a million tones of marble
and granite being mined out that region, it is proving to be a substantial
source of income

May 04, 2009

Pakistan’s President
Asif Ali Zardari will be afforded perhaps five minutes of diplomatic niceties when
he meets U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday before he is sat down for an
extended period of a sobering talking-to. A nuclear armed jihad is at the top
of Obama’s long list of nightmare scenarios that he would like to go through
with Zardari.

It is not without
purpose that The New York Times has carried a story today pointing out that
administration officials are worried about “new vulnerabilities for Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal”. The timing of the story is deliberate and motivated by the
Obama-Zardari meeting. Not that the White House needs the NYT shoulder to fire
from but it helps to prime Zardari for what is in store for him. Zardari may be
incompetent in delivering good governance but he has the political smarts to
anticipate a discussion on the safety of the nuclear weapons.

While as the
president is supposed to be in charge of the National Command Authority that
oversees nuclear warheads, everybody knows that it is his Army Chief and permanent
nemesis General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani who really has the operational control of
this most important national strategic asset. Kayani is as likely to let
Washington know the locations where the up to 100 nuclear weapons have been
stored safely as Obama is likely to tell him where US warheads are. When
everything else about Pakistan seems to be coming apart, these weapons are
really the country’s absolutely final bargaining chip. If it comes to that the
generals in Pakistan would hide them in their pants.

Obama does not
really have any option other than engaging Zardari even though he knows the
inherent futility of that exercise. The president’s control over the Pakistani
state is tenuous at best and is in jeopardy of unraveling without any notice.
His odd rise to the country’s highest office, despite some very obvious flaws,
gave Zardari an extraordinary opportunity to redeem not just himself but to
fundamentally alter the direction of the national discourse. Instead he chose
to make ineffectual noises and yield to the very forces he is supposed to
marginalize. The Swat Valley deal with the Taliban over the imposition of
Sharia laws was an embarrassing example of his inept governance. How is it a
deal when you are giving whatever the adversary wants but not getting anything
in return? Laying down arms was supposed to be the Taliban’s side of the deal.
Instead they invaded Buner district in a clear move to expand their influence
close to Islamabad.

There are some speculations
that the U.S. may already be courting former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the
eventuality that Zardari is dislodged. People should not forget that the same
Sharif was done in by then Army Chief Pervez Musharraf in a bloodless coup in
1999. The intelligentsia in Pakistan knows that their country needs to graduate
beyond cynical deal-making that has been the mainstay of its fake democracy for
decades. Unless it first creates a visionary leadership and then gets behind it
to radically overhaul all national institutions for the next 20 years, the world will continue to
find hustlers as its interlocutors from Islamabad.

April 28, 2009

Now that Pakistan has taken the fight to the Taliban, one
wonders why it did not so earlier. The country’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik
has been quoted as saying of the Taliban, “We will not tolerate them anymore.”
The resolve in that assertion ought to make the international community happy.

He also said something that should have been the guiding
principle of the government from the get-go. "No one will be allowed to
challenge the writ of the government," Malik said. The writ of the
government was not just challenged by the Taliban when it took over the Swat
Valley, it was ridiculed when it walked into Buner District unmolested.

A major military offensive was launched in the Lower Dir
area, which is about 170 kilometers northwest of the capital Islamabad. So far
some 70 militants have been killed in the action which is likely to continue. North
West Frontier Province (NWFP) Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain repeated
Malik’s comment when he said, "The government needed to deploy security
forces in Buner because the militants were challenging its writ.”

Pakistan has to be aware that this is not a fight it can
leave halfway in the hope that the military has made its point. The Taliban has
been known to be both persistent because it sees its fight as an eternal one.
Their goals and those of Al-Qaeda are so nebulous that it is hard for any military
force trained to understand and deal with a conflict in terms of its beginning
and end to effectively deal with the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine.

It is some consolation that Islamabad was propelled into
action by the mounting criticism of its handling of the crisis around the
world, particularly in Washington. Unless the Pakistanis see this fight as a
battle for their own survival and create enough pressure on the country’s military
and political institutions it is unlikely that the campaign against the Taliban
will be sustained.

In this context one has to mention the highly mature role
played by some of the country’s leading newspapers in reminding the government
as well as the military that their focus should be the Taliban’s immediate
threat rather than obsessing over what India might or might not do. "At
this juncture, we know that we have the army strong in numbers and strength to
take care of the Taliban, but we first must convince it that the threat from
India is only relative while that of the Taliban is absolute,” The Daily Times
said in an editorial.

This distinction must be at the center of any policy shift
in Pakistan vis-à-vis India. There is no serious constituency in India that is
even remotely interested in engaging in any military adventurism in Pakistan.
The major demographic shift in India in the past two decades, which has led to
a population of 550 million people below the age of 25, is bound to cause a
fundamental policy shift as well. Young Indians, like young people anywhere in
the world, are no longer interested in settling historic scores. Slow but
surely India’s political classes have begun to understand this important
development.